ond and a half, which Kirbey admitted was
reasonably close. As soon as the screens cleared, they saw that they
weren't too late. The Moon of Marduk was under fire and firing back.

They'd have detection, and he knew what they were detecting--a clump
of sixteen rending distortions of the fabric of space-time, as
sixteen ships came into sudden existence in the normal continuum.
Beside him, Bentrik had a screen on; it was still milky-white,
and he was speaking into a radio hand-phone.

"Simon Bentrik, Prince-Protector of Marduk, calling Moonbase."
Then, slowly, he repeated his screen-combination twice. "Come in,
Moonbase; this is Simon Bentrik, Prince-Protector, speaking."

He waited ten seconds, and was about to start again, when the screen
flickered. The man who appeared in it wore the insignia of a
Mardukan navy commodore. He needed a shave, but he was grinning
happily. Bentrik greeted him by name.

"Hello, Simon; glad to see you. Your Highness, I mean; what is this
Prince-Protector thing?"

"Somebody had to do it. Is the King still alive?"

The grin slid off the commodore's face, starting with his eyes.

"We don't know. At first, Makann had him speaking by screen--you
know what it was like--urging everybody to obey and co-operate
with 'our trusted Chancellor.' Makann always appeared on the screen
with him."

Bentrik nodded. "I remember."

"Before you left, Makann kept quiet, and let the King make the
speech. After a while, the King wasn't able to speak coherently;
he'd stammer, and repeat. So then Makann did all the talking; they
couldn't even depend on him to parrot what they were giving him with
an earplug phone. Then he stopped appearing entirely. I suppose
there were physical symptoms they couldn't allow to be seen."
Bentrik was cursing horribly under his breath; the officer
at Moonbase nodded. "I hope for his sake that he is dead."

Poor Goodman Mikhyl. Bentrik was saying, "So do I." Trask agreed,
mentally. The commodore at Moonbase was still talking:

"We got two more renegade RMN ships, within a hundred hours after
you left." He named them. "And we got one of the Dunnan ships, the
_Fortuna_. We blew out the Malverton Navy Yard. They're still using
the Antarctic Naval Base, but we've knocked out a good deal of that.
We got the _Honest Horris_. They made two attempts to land on us and
lost a couple of ships. Eight hundred hours ago, they were joined by
the rest of Dunnan's fleet, five ships. They mad